My father’s favorite singer was Sam Cooke.  He bought every new Sam Cooke album as soon as it came out, carrying the disk home in a flat bag from the Sam Goody’s in Brooklyn he passed on his way home from work.  We would listen to the sides over and over on the turntable in the living room. Nobody ever sang better than the smooth, soulful Sam Cooke, and nobody before him, apparently, with the possible exception of Frank Sinatra, ever had a better handle on the business side of their musical careers. 

There is much to say about this remarkable man, a supremely graceful musician who never sang a wrong note, or a note without its full emotional impact, a master pop songwriter and producer, a nurturer of young talent,  a cross-over artist often credited with inventing soul music, an icon.  I read and recommend the great biography by Peter Guralnick, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, which came out very shortly after my father died.  

It may have even been released a week or two after my father died (first hit on google informs me it was published three years after Irv died, another site says it was released about a year after, the third gives the publication date, very authoritatively, as a few months after he died.  Fucking internet…).   Many times while reading it I thought what a shame my father had never gotten a chance to read the wonderfully detailed account of his musical idol’s life.  I need to peruse a copy of it to find and accurately set out the scene I’m about to describe from almost eleven year-old  memory.

It was a scene that struck me with particular poignancy.  After Cooke wrote and recorded the classic “A Change Is Gonna Come”, which became an anthem of the Civil Rights movement, a symbol of the struggle almost as famous as King’s “I Have A Dream” speech,  he sat with his guitarist listening to the playback.  He turned to him, I believe it was his longtime friend and collaborator Leroy Crume (though, if it was his guitarist, google suggests it may have been Clifton White, who played on most of his albums including the beautiful Mr. Soul)  (and, if it wasn’t a guitarist, it was most likely S.R. Crain who sang back-up on the recording) and said “this is good, isn’t it? You think my father would like it?”  

And his friend said to him “Sam, your father would love it.  He would be very proud of you.”  Sam died two weeks before the track he performed live only once was released as a single.    

NPR tells a nice story of the origin of the tune, and they quote Guralnick, but without that anecdote, which, I have to say, reading it shortly after my own father’s death, got to me a bit.  I have not been able to verify on-line that his father, Reverend Charles A. Cook, was actually gone by the time he wrote and recorded the tune, but that’s the internet for you.

I thought of Sam Cooke just now because I read today that he was seated ringside at the Cassius Clay- Sonny Liston fight in Miami in February 1964.  Malcolm X was also at ringside, already cast out of the Nation of Islam by Elijah Muhammad, and hoping that a victorious Cassius X, a man who fondly regarded him as a wise older brother and good friend, would  be his ticket back in.  Sam Cooke and Malcolm exchanged greetings before the fight and were both with the victorious new twenty-two year-old world heavy weight champion at his private victory party at the Hampton House Hotel.  

The three opted to stay at the colored Hampton House for the party, also attended by football great and Richard Pryor friend Jim Brown, rather than a more upscale party originally planned for the Fountainbleu, Miami Beach’s swankiest hotel.   Cooke, at the height of his powers, had, in fact, managed to talk his way into a suite at the strictly segregated Fountainbleu, having his manager make a scene until Cooke got his suite there.  But the celebration took place in the colored part of town where the new champ was much more comfortable.

Before the year was out, after an infamous summer of riots, Cooke would be dead at 33, shot by the night manager of the seedy Hacienda Motel in Watts as he banged on her office window, wearing only a sport jacket, screaming that a hooker had stolen all his clothes and his wallet.  His last words, according to the woman who killed him, were “lady, you shot me!”

My father mourned this death, even as he gave a dark laugh when he described the crude attempt, by the Amsterdam News, I think it was, to draw some clothes on the naked, dead body of Mr. Soul.

Malcolm would be shot dead almost exactly a year after greeting Sam Cooke at the fight and the after-party, after being marked as a traitor worthy of death by The Messenger, Louis X (Farrakhan) and others inside the Nation of Islam (with assists from the FBI, NYPD and others).  Clay would become Muhammad Ali not long after the fight, and, under orders from The Messenger, shun his former mentor Malcolm X, regarded by the hypocrite Elijah Muhammad as a traitor, liar and hypocrite, a man worthy of death.  

Once Ali, who my father also got a big kick out of and quoted at the table,  turned his back on Malcolm in blind obedience to the so-called Messenger, the rest, as they say…